I should clarify why I brought up the subject of Odd Nerdrum in the first place.
I apologize ahead of time for this art history 101 quickie survey, which is probably familiar to everyone, but I'm trying to provide the basic context for Nerdrum's appearance, and don't know how else to do it.
The high-water mark of literary Modernism was shortly after WWI, but in the visual arts it was shortly after WWII. Modernism in both instances began by a process of stripping away what was viewed as extraneous. In literature this process may have been fairly fluid and open-ended, depending on which school you are considering, but in painting, after WWII, the situation was much more restrictive. The range of possibilities began contracting with a vengeance and -- far more than in literature -- this process was conducted by a mere handful of critics, whose authority was virtually total. Painting became ever more and more reductive, ever closer to absolute minimalism, with the result that ever fewer artists were found to merit serious critical consideration. One response to this situation of increasing suffocation was Pop Art in the 60s, which basically thumbed its nose at the whole notion of serious art, and effectively broke the hammerlock of the critics and opened the f!
lood gates.
Just all this was happening, Nerdrum was commencing his own one-man revolution against minimalism and pop-art both, and it involved a rejection of virtually the entire Modernist enterprise in European art -- not just the previous generation, but the whole previous century. (There are now quite a number of exceptional artists working in pre-Modernist modes but, at the time, in the 60s, there was only Nerdrum). He was a student in a prestigious painting academy (I forgot which one), and because he refused to change his direction, he was thrown out. Later he became the student of, of all people, Joseph Beuys, who considered Nerdrum the most radical student he had ever encountered.
Once it was known that Beuys took him seriously, the critics had to deal with him. As one of them put it (I'm paraphrasing from memory), Nerdrum embodied the whole post-Modernist dilemma. The critics didn't know how to admit Nerdrum to the pantheon of 20th-century European art without cracking the Edifice.
And I'm going to stop there. Personally I see meaningful parallels between painting and poetry in regards to Nerdrum's situation and questions of post-Modernism generally, but that's a larger subject than I'm qualified to tackle. What I can do, though, if anyone wishes to take a closer look at Nerdrum's effect on European painting, is provide the titles & authors of the first significant critical responses to Nerdrum.
bj
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